I can related well to this article because of a past job experience.
The job was software developement for a large corporation, in an office setting. The dept was devided into different teams and each team worked on different features of the same major project.
To my manager it looked like I was coming in late, leaving early and not doing a whole lot to be productive around the office.
What actually was happening was that I wasn't able to be as productive in the office setting. I would copy what I working on to a floppy and take it home to work on it. After waking up in the morning, more ideas came so I went ahead and put them in, making myself late in the process.
The features I was working on was completed on time, despite having to wait for others to get done with their part. Always tried to write code efficiently and with as few lines a possible, with good comments and white spacing.
Despite all my efforts, I was given a less than average performance review. I got chewed out for leaving early and put on a peformance improvement program (which happens to be very close to being fired) and means you don't get a raise or bonus.
There needs to be some measure of performance for programmers but it should really be about getting the job done to the customer's satifaction and within a reasonable time frame. Hours spent in the office, lines of code and all the other bullshit management uses should be as considered secondary measurements at best.
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I can related well to this article because of a past job experience. The job was software developement for a large corporation, in an office setting. The dept was devided into different teams and each team worked on different features of the same major project. To my manager it looked like I was coming in late, leaving early and not doing a whole lot to be productive around the office. What actually was happening was that I wasn't able to be as productive in the office setting. I would copy what I working on to a floppy and take it home to work on it. After waking up in the morning, more ideas came so I went ahead and put them in, making myself late in the process. The features I was working on was completed on time, despite having to wait for others to get done with their part. Always tried to write code efficiently and with as few lines a possible, with good comments and white spacing. Despite all my efforts, I was given a less than average performance review. I got chewed out for leaving early and put on a peformance improvement program (which happens to be very close to being fired) and means you don't get a raise or bonus. There needs to be some measure of performance for programmers but it should really be about getting the job done to the customer's satifaction and within a reasonable time frame. Hours spent in the office, lines of code and all the other bullshit management uses should be as considered secondary measurements at best.